Some Canadian cities are being recognized by an American project to use data to measure the success of the world’s top entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Startup Genome is ranking Toronto as the fourth-best startup ecosystem globally, after Silicon Valley, New York City, and London. Vancouver is ranked 16th on the list, and Montreal rounds it out in spot 25. Startup Genome collected data from 16,000 startups that signed up to use its Startup Compass tool, which helps businesses benchmark themselves compared to others. The project released its list and initial comparison between the top three ecosystems yesterday on TechCrunch.

Startup Genome’s founders wanted to add to the qualitative reports of startup ecosystems in various cities with some hard and fast data, according to TechCrunch. The initial numbers show that Silicon Valley startups still enjoy a big advantage when across several factors, but that gap is shrinking.

Silicon Valley firms raise two to three times more money in the most early stages of development than New York and London, for example. There are 22 per cent more companies in the growth or “scale” stage in the Valley than in NYC, and those firms create 11 per cent more jobs than in NYC.

“The goal of the project is extremely ambitious – to map, model and analyze what makes startups tick, what helps them succeed and why many of them fail. We are hoping that the insights generated through this project will create useful tools for increasing success rates of startups during their initial growth periods, as well as will shed light on interesting phenomena, pitfalls to avoid and much more,” Ron Berman, the founder of Startup Genome writes on the project’s blog.

Calgary didn’t make Startup Genome’s list, despite ranking ahead of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal in the Toronto Board of Trade’s recent ranking of Canadian ICT clusters. Here’s Startup Genomes rankings for the world’s top 25 startup ecosystems, ordered by their average throughput:

Silicon Valley (San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland)

New York City (NYC, Brooklyn)

London

Toronto

Tel Aviv

Los Angeles

Singapore

Sao Paulo

Bangalore

Moscow

Paris

Santiago

Seattle

Madrid

Chicago

Vancouver

Berlin

Boston

Austin

Mumbai

Sydney

Melbourne

Warsaw

Washington D.C.

Montreal

Three Canadian cities are named in the world’s top 25 startup ecosystems.